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Thai Food in the 801

Gameface said:
My best bet would be Sawadee. You might want to call ahead and make your preferences known.

Problem with trying to find Thai food that is like the Thai food you had in Thailand is that there is an Americanized standard for Thai food (just like with almost all cultural food in the U.S.) and it's not easy to venture from that standard and succeed, especially in a place like SLC, Utah. But most of these places are owned and operated by people from Thailand, so if you reach out to them they can make the dish you want the way you want it, within reason. In a lot of cases things are the way they are because that's what's available in the local supply chain. But if it's a matter of a little more fish sauce or dark soy, they can probably do that, along with adding the spices/chilies to the cooking process (completely agree that it makes a HUGE difference).
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I meant to say "I haven't found anything that comes close to the food stands in Thailand or many of the restaurants and food trucks in Portland." I understand we won't get the same food as we can get in Thailand, but many Portland restaurants are very similar, but nothing in Utah I have tried comes close. I'll try Sawadee next time I am in town. I tend to travel there for business every month or every other month.
 
I generally have an issue with the term "authentic" when it comes to food. In Thailand there are almost certainly thousands of takes on what Drunken Noodles are, if that is even a traditional Thai dish and not just an exported recipe developed for the taste buds of people outside Thailand.

Any traditional dish is made countless ways. There is really no such thing as "authentic" in my opinion. The best that can be done is to make something that tastes good and is desirable by enough of the people in the location it is made to make it reasonable to put it on a menu.

Wanting something "here" to taste like it came from "there" is not unreasonable, but it's also frequently unobtainable. The local supply chain, local ingredients, etc, are all going to have an impact, but the biggest impact will always be commercial viability. What will people "here" eat, what will they pay for? You can't force food on customers and just yell at them about authenticity. You have to offer things they want to eat.

I don't really care if the Thai food I eat in SLC is the same as the Thai food in Thailand (or Portland). What I care about is if the food I'm eating tastes good to me. I can certainly try to better understand Thai cuisine and get closer to what people in Thailand enjoy. If that is my goal I'm far more likely to find success making that food myself, in my kitchen, sourcing ingredients diligently according to the standard I'm attempting to achieve. Short of that, **** holding a commercial restaurant to a standard that would bankrupt them.
 
Gameface said:
I generally have an issue with the term "authentic" when it comes to food. In Thailand there are almost certainly thousands of takes on what Drunken Noodles are, if that is even a traditional Thai dish and not just an exported recipe developed for the taste buds of people outside Thailand.

Any traditional dish is made countless ways. There is really no such thing as "authentic" in my opinion. The best that can be done is to make something that tastes good and is desirable by enough of the people in the location it is made to make it reasonable to put it on a menu.

Wanting something "here" to taste like it came from "there" is not unreasonable, but it's also frequently unobtainable. The local supply chain, local ingredients, etc, are all going to have an impact, but the biggest impact will always be commercial viability. What will people "here" eat, what will they pay for? You can't force food on customers and just yell at them about authenticity. You have to offer things they want to eat.

I don't really care if the Thai food I eat in SLC is the same as the Thai food in Thailand (or Portland). What I care about is if the food I'm eating tastes good to me. I can certainly try to better understand Thai cuisine and get closer to what people in Thailand enjoy. If that is my goal I'm far more likely to find success making that food myself, in my kitchen, sourcing ingredients diligently according to the standard I'm attempting to achieve. Short of that, **** holding a commercial restaurant to a standard that would bankrupt them.
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Was that directed at me? If so, I never said "authentic" and clearly delineated what I was looking for (plenty of sauce, fresh thai chiles (fresh thai basil is good too).

I've lived in NorCal, Portland, Chicago, DC, and they all have restaurants with decent Drunken Noodles, and the recipe/flavor is essentially the same. Hell, I even found a decent version in Spokane near Gonzaga. I do make my own, but find it is cheaper for me to get from a restaurant as the local Thai grocery is expensive.

I travel to Utah frequently for work, and have been mostly disappointed with the Drunken Noodle offerings in Utah. One place didn't even use rice noodles. I am sure there are decent options, but don't know where, which is why I asked. I've tried a few of the top star Google/yelp rated places, and many dishes were good, but the Pad Kee Mao has just been ok at best, just not good flavor. I'll try Sawdee next time I'm in town. Thanks for the recommendation.

And as far as Bangkok versions, I tried probably 15 different versions, and all were very similar (maybe the rest of the country is different, but I doubt it). The main difference with the USA versions is the price (when I lived in Bangkok for a summer it was about $2.00 U.S., the only outlier being Jae Fai, which was almost $25 U.S. at the time, and it wasn't worth the hype-small portion, not worth the price or hype (Michelin rated shack, advanced reservation or early a.m. waitlist, which is what we did) and the level of spice. I ordered mild everywhere in Bangkok, and order medium to hot almost everywhere in the U.S. The one outlier is Baan Thai in Portland. Anything above mild is crazy hot (and they use fresh thai chilis). And they warn you.
 
My favorite place to get breakfast is Dees. They have a scramble/platter thing with hash browns, bacon, onions, peppers, eggs, and biscuits and gravy so piled on top of each other. It's so good.

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Authenticity is an interesting thing. The more I've thought about it over time, the less I think it exists. Even if we broke down American food, there are certainly styles of food that we could say are authentic, but there's such huge range in style within that, as well as quality, and even things that are "authentic" American food could be something that has a unique taste or presentation that you've never seen before. To demonstrate that, try to think out how often you're in search of new food only to have it taste just like something you've already had. So even within an "authenticity" range, we still expect novel tastes. And that's just within our own genre of food. We also always hear about authenticity tied to certain locales that makes things more alluring for us because the scarcity of being able to obtain that. For instance, you can't have a "true" philly cheesesteak in Utah, or eating lobster here "isn't like it is in Maine." There's a great degree of truth to a lot of this, but a lot of times we build something up that it ends up not living up to its hype.

I'm also not generally a fan of big chain restaurants like an Olive Garden or On the Border or stuff like that. But I think a lot of times we start to resent chains like that simply because they're not authentic, or they're too commercialized, that we contrast those with smaller or local establishments and we accentuate the differences to some degree of hyperbole. Not always. But ultimately it does go down to taste. Sometimes a Big Mac is just badass. I don't care if commercialization brought that to my palate. Sometimes it's just good. But we often times seek out authentic, not as a means to an ends, but as the ends itself. What makes authentic Mexican food, anyway? There's not "one thing" that's authentic. And then there are different regions. How would one even answer the question of what's authentic American? There's no one place you could go that would perfectly encapsulate it, and even of the places that we thing would give a good sampling of it, those are also the exceptions as they're not necessarily every-day things.

A lot of places can do good wings. But sometimes Buffalo Wild Wings is just the best.
 
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